DEMOCRATS CAN COUNT THEIR CHICKENS

July 10, 2008 - Ray Hall (Archive)

The year Aught-Eight will be remembered as a big year for Democrats. Speaker Polosi will pick up about forty new house seats and for whatever good it’ll do Senator Harry Reid will get nine or ten additional seats in the Senate for a bulletproof majority. Barack Obama, a Senator from Illinois, will be elected President going away in November. Although a sweeping Democratic victory isn’t etched in stone it is etched in the steel ball Republicans have managed to screw up over the last eight years.

Republican officeholders have become the perpetual pain in the butt party. John McCain as the Republican standard bearer is doing the best he can to put a reasonable face on a political party that has embraced so many bizarre causes that fewer and fewer Americans take them seriously. McCain manages a straight face when he says the U.S. will stay in Iraq for as long as it takes to achieve victory. No one, not even McCain, knows what that means, especially after President Bush declared victory four years ago during his “mission accomplished” photo-op on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. During the last eight years the Grand Old Party became so strongly identified with evangelical Christian politics that “Faith-Based” family values turned out to be even more tawdry than an Elmer Gantry traveling salvation show. Americans accepted that Terry Schiavo, the Florida woman ordered by the courts to be removed from a feeding tube was a serious, even urgent matter of life and death. However, even the righteous became embarrassed when such a divisive spiritual and personal family matter became a Congressional sideshow.

Republican office holders in real life circumstances have eliminated the “gay card” from the deck of Republican wedge issues. Senator McCain and his Republican colleagues are hard put to convince voters “gays in the military” has any political mileage, especially after the way veterans were treated at Walter Reed. “Gay-marriage” is rapidly becoming a hard reality as families spread throughout the spectrum of the faithful increasingly discover loved ones engaged in a homosexual life style. The infidelity of stalwart Republicans in Congress has kept pace with sexually sinful Democrats to the point of voters becoming bored with both.

Republicans led by Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) continues to rail against Al Gore as the front guy in a global conspiracy to ruin the economy by telling us the environmental sky is falling from an overload of green houses gases. It is hard to say where McCain is on the issue, but increasingly voters understand that climate change will occur whether man made or not and that something should be done about it--if we ignore it, either way, we’re screwed.

Republican candidates this fall must contend with bodies floating in New Orleans Streets to “heck of a job Brownie,” to “no child left behind” to the “politicization of Justice Department prosecutions, to Abu Ghaib torture and prisoner abuse to Guantanamo to the greatest budget deficit in US history and $5.00 gasoline in California. Republicans are left to use talking heads like Glen Beck to chatter endlessly that Bush and the Republicans have made us safe from terrorist attacks. “The greatest evidence,” he says in exasperation that the world doesn’t get it “is that we haven’t been attacked since 9-11.” By golly, you’ve got me there, but that’s like claiming God is a Republican because a doomsday meteorite hasn’t hit planet earth.

Unless John McCain can persuade General Colin Powell or Senator Olympia Snow (R-Maine) to be his running mate, he’s is in real political trouble. About the only thing left for the Republicans to say is that Democrats have been known to count their chickens before they hatch.